CogBlog

In 1997 I co-founded COGBOX in with Michelle DeCol. Since then we've offered online marketing, web development and corporate and brand identity to a wide range of clients. Here I post thoughts and comments on search marketing, recent projects, and other things I find interesting.

This is what it looks like when a spambot tries to exploit your site.

Published Friday, June 23, 2006 by chris | E-mail this post

A while ago we made a simple little spam-bot blacklisting tool. It checks form submissions from our sites for people trying to exploit them by injecting MIME mail headers. If it detects this, it will block the submission, record their IP address, block any further access from that address, and send us an email.

Many sites have no protection from this kind of exploitation. Their mail servers inadvertently send out hundreds of spam messages without them ever knowing. This then can cause big ISPs like Earthlink, to block their mail server--hurting deliverability of their legitimate messages.

It seems like the spam comes in waves. Today was particularly active. Here's what my inbox looks like from just a portion of our spamblocker alert messages: